Tag Archives: abilities

My favourite hero to play in HotS is Nazeebo. He’s a specialist meaning he’s very good at siege damage, and his basic attack drains health and mana, making him a top choice to solo lanes. His single target damage doesn’t rival that of an assassin, but he can do lots of area damage.

Here are some tips on how to make the most of Nazeebo’s abilities.

Voodoo Ritual is a passive ability applied with Nazeebo’s basic attack. Getting this poison up on enemies is good,and you’re be able to see when the DoT with kill a creep on their health bar, allowing you to switch and attack something else. This DoT is also good for keeping stealthy opponents out of stealth.

Corpse Spiders will do initial damage where they land, then go after whatever enemy or structure is closest. The base ability summons 3 spiders that last 4 seconds. These are pretty good at chasing retreating enemies.

Zombie Wall can clinch a team fight. Or completely screw your team over. There’s a delay after casting this, so it can be hard to trap the hero you’re targeting. Keep an eye out for stunned heroes which are easier to trap, or try to anticipate the movement of your target.

If you accidentally trap a teammate (or yourself), you can press W again in order to remove the wall.

Some other uses for Zombie Wall:

Aiding in escapes. If you’re on the run, cast the zombie wall in your current location so it traps, or at least blocks the heroes chasing you.

Blocking. Most maps have choke points where dropping a zombie wall can really screw over your opponents. You can trap them in small passages, allowing your team to kill them quickly. In maps like Dragon Shire, you can drop Zombie Wall at one of the entrances to the shrines to keep enemies out (or in). You can also drop the wall over an enemy gate to keep them in or out.

Soaking. When you’re laning and getting close to enemy structures you can place the zombie wall next to a turret, tower, or fort. The structure will then shoot at the zombies rather than you or your team’s minions. This tactic can also be used to soak ammo.

Merc camps. Drop this in the middle of a merc camp so the zombies are taking damage instead of you.

Plague of Toads summons 5 toads from your location, which will hop a ways and explode when they reach an enemy or structure. The toads don’t move too quickly so they can be fairly easily avoided. In a team fight, try to aim them at heroes who are stunned, trapped, or just really close and won’t have a chance to get away.

Gargantuan is a level 10 talent (spoiler: this is the one I’m going to recommend in my upcoming talent guide). This big guy hits hard, but you can’t specifically tell him what to attack. He does huge damage to minions and structures, making him great for laning or defending against mercs.

Stomp. Once he’s been summoned, Gargantuan has an AoE Stomp attack that can be triggered every few seconds by pressing R.

Merc camps. Nazeebo excels at taking merc camps to start out with but with this guy, they are a breeze. Stomp, stomp, stomp.

He will avenge you. Gargantuan doesn’t die when Nazeebo does. So keep your eye on him as you’re waiting to respawn and continue making use of Stomp.

I posted this on my guild forums a while back which seemed to help a couple of the raid groups that were having trouble with Chimaeron, I thought other people might find it useful too.

Chimaeron is a fight that is all about timing. As a healer, it’s easy to freak out a little when the tanks are taking massive hits and the raid is often sitting at 1 health. However, with a clear understanding of Chimaeron’s abilities and timing the fight becomes very predictable and the healing becomes quite simple.

Tank Damage

Chimaeron has a 5 second swing timer. The things that make this fight difficult for the tanks and their healers are Break and Double Attack.

One important thing to note is that the Break (which increases damage taken) will only stack up to 4 times. Because of this, the easiest way (for the healers anyway) to handle the tanking is for the first tank to tank for the majority of the encounter and take all the Breaks, while the second tank only taunts when the Double Attack buff is gained, takes the double attack, then the first tank taunts back.

What does this mean?

The Double Attack tank must be topped off after each Double Attack.

The main (Break) tank only needs to be kept above 10,000 health during the non-Feud phase.

I know that as a healer it’s tough to let a tank sit at such low health, but you’ll save yourself a lot of time, effort and mana by doing it this way.

Raid damage

The basic timeline for raid damage looks like this (numbers are rounded slightly):

Caustic Slime is cast on 2 people at a time (5 on 25), every 4.5 seconds.

After 3 rounds of Caustic Slime hits, there will be a Massacre (4.5 seconds after the last slime).

Feud will start at approximately the same time as a Massacre.

15 seconds after the Feud starts, Caustic Slime will be cast on the raid every 4.5 seconds. It is cast 3 times.

4.5 seconds after the third Slime, the Feud will end and a Massacre will happen.

15 seconds after the Massacre, he will start casting Slimes again.

The only thing that is not constant:

How many Caustic Slime ‘cycles’ will happen in between Feuds. Sometimes you’ll get 1 cycle of slimes and then the Feud will hit, sometimes you will get 2 or 3.

So what do we learn from this?

Healing before the Feud:

If you are healing the people hit with Caustic Slime during the non-Feud phase, you must use your fast, direct heals (Regrowth for druids, Flash/Binding Heal for priests, Flash of Light/Word of Glory/Holy Shock for pallies, Riptide/hasted Healing Wave/Healing Surge for shaman)*. You only have 4.5 seconds before the next slimes hit, so you need to be able to get a couple 10K+ heals off in this time.

You have 15 seconds to get the raid healed up to 10k after the Massacre.

Healing through the Feud:

In normal mode, the tanks are not getting hit by melee attacks, so they don’t need any special attention – all healers should be healing the raid.

Use AoE heals to heal everyone through this. Remember that he won’t start casting slimes on the raid for ~15 seconds after the Massacre, so don’t waste your damage mitigation abilities (Barkskin, Power Word: Barrier) by using them immediately.

Plan your cooldown use ahead of time so you have some kind of large group heal or group damage mitigation up for each Feud (Tranquility, ToL, PW:B, Hymn of Hope).

Zelmaru at Murloc Parliament has suggested that everyone recycle a post in honor of Earth day. Never one to pass up a chance to be lazy, I accept this challenge! That leaves me with the dilemma of what to repost. This blog is only a few months old, so my post archive isn’t that big. My first thought was to repost My Favorite Raid Bosses to fish for comments (no comments, really? No one had a favorite raid boss to add? No one wanted to tell me I’m crazy for liking certain bosses?), but that post is barely a month old, so I’m not going to repost it.

Instead I’m going to recycle one of my early posts about a topic near and dear to my heart, How to Not Die.

One very important aspect of raiding, no matter what role you play, is to take as little damage as possible. Not just obvious avoidance like not standing in fire (although that is very important) but also making the best use of your class’s damage reduction abilities and any other tools available to you.

When someone dies, don’t automatically blame the healers. A lot of deaths can be prevented by the players themselves.

I’m sure most people know their own class’s abilities, but you might not be familiar with what everyone else can do. This post isn’t just aimed at specific classes, I’m also aiming for healers, raid leaders, and avid combat log analysts so you can tell if all your fellow raiders are doing everything in their power to keep themselves alive and make raids go smoothly.

Obviously some of these skills are more practical than others, so you have to know when to use them. Things like Barkskin can be used often with little impact to your damage or healing output. But on a boss with a tight enrage timer, it’s probably not a good idea to use something like Dispersion or Hand of Protection which is going to diminish your dps just to avoid a little splash damage. If it is a life or death situation (like you’ve missed a stack of the Inoculation buff on Festergut, and a Pungent Blight is coming), take the initiative and save yourself.

Here’s a list of class-specific damage reducing abilities that people can use in raids:

Death Knights:

Anti-magic Shell – Good against magic based bosses. Also refills your runic power bar!

Icebound Fortitude – A 20% damage reduction for non-tanks. Shouldn’t mess up damage rotations as it only requires runic power (no runes).

Bone Shield – Should always be up for unholy DK’s because of the damage buff. If the charges get used up, be sure to refresh it.

Frost Presence – Clearly a dps doesn’t want to stay in Frost Presence for very long. But for predictable damage, switching quickly for the extra health and damage mitigation can be useful.

Druids: Barkskin – This ability should get used a lot. I see so many druids who go through a whole raid using this once, or sometimes not at all. 20% less damage taken for 12 seconds every minute. There is no downside to this. Use it please!!! For specific tips on when it use it, see Barkskin and You.

Switching forms can be a pain, but when you’re being hit by something or need more health to survive, a quick switch to Bear form will help you live longer.

Hunter:Deterrence – This ability can save your life in a lot of fights. It can be used to avoid heaps on damage from things like Bone Storm, Malleable Goo and Radiating Ooze in ICC.

Mage:Ice Barrier – Frost only, not that I’ve seen anything other than Arcane mages for the last month or two.

Mana Shield – Assuming you have the mana for it.

Frost Ward – Absorbs frost damage.

Fire Ward – Absorbs fire damage.

Ice Block – I think this is one of the most useful skills out there. Removes most harmful debuffs and makes you completely impervious to damage. Lucky mages.

Paladin:Divine Shield – Removes most debuffs, in addition to preventing all damage for 12 seconds. If being used by a dps, should be clicked off when no longer needed to avoid screwing up your damage output too much.

Divine Protection – Usually used by prot pallies, but still useful for others. Lacks the damage output reduction of DS. Does not remove debuffs.

Hand of Protection – Also removes most physical debuffs. Can be used and clicked off when no longer needed to reduce downtime. Can be used on others, so it might be a good idea to use one of your self-use only skills first.

Priests:Power Word: Shield – If you don’t have a Disc Priest throwing these around the raid, a timely PW:S can save you. And yes, it can be cast in Shadow Form.

Shaman:Shamanistic Rage – This is usually used on cooldown for mana regen, but if you can line up its use with incoming damage, your healers will like you more.

Warlock:Shadow Ward – Absorbs shadow damage.

Warrior:Defensive Stance – Like Frost Presence, not something you want to use a lot, but a quick stance swap can be useful.

Shield Wall – Putting on a shield, flipping to defensive stance and hitting this is rather unwieldy and won’t be done often, but I’ve seen it used to save a raid from a 1% wipe.

Healers take note of the abilities like Feint, Shamanistic Rage and Anti-Magic Shell. When you see a DPS class with one of these abilities not run away from something like a Lightning Nova, don’t assume they are lazy noobs. If they’re smart they can pop these abilities and not lose any dps-time on the boss. So don’t stop healing them out of principle 🙂

And some general tips for all:

Don’t pull aggro – Most classes have threat reducing/dropping moves. Make use of them before the boss comes stampeding towards you. And for heaven’s sake, don’t use Whirlwind as your opener on a pack of trash mobs.

Don’t stand in fire – I just never get tired of repeating this one. I know the old tunnel vision trap is easy to fall into. A large part of avoiding bad things on the ground is being able to see them, so this problem can often be solved with a good UI. Don’t clutter your UI with enough mods and meters that you can’t see half your screen. Also, make sure you can see your health bar (by moving it to a place your eyes automatically track to, or using a HUD) or have some kind of visual or audio notification to tell you when you’re taking damage. If you’re taking unexpected damage, the answer might be to move.

Use your health stones/health pots – I can’t even say how many times I’ve gone through a whole raid without using my health stone. To increase the likelihood of using these things, make sure they get integrated into the way you play. If you use keybinds, have one for your health stone. If you’re a Clique user, assign a mouse-click to it. If you put your health stone on an action bar on the side of your screen that you never look at, you aren’t going to use it.

Post succcessfully recycled! Happy Earth Day everyone. Have you hugged a tree today?